Catering to Millennial Investors and Job Seekers

According to data from Wells Fargo and TheMuse, if given
$1,000 in spare cash to invest, 86% of Millennials would be motivated to invest in a company
that “makes the world a better place with their products.”

Kathryn Minshew is the CEO and founder of TheMuse.com, which
she describes as a “career networking platform used by over 50 million
Millennials and hundreds of employers to help individuals navigate their
working lives.”

The real value of TheMuse, Minshew suggests, is found in the
rich and more or less unique dataset the firm has been able to collect with the
permission of its users, covering many Millennials but also individuals from
Generation X and the Baby Boomers. More and more, Minshew has been asked to
share this comparative data (and her own personal insight) with retirement plan
providers and employee benefits industry stakeholders, as she did at a
recent Wells
Fargo Asset Management press discussion in New York.

“Our data suggests that Millennials will make up 75% of the
workforce by the year 2025,” she told a group of financial trade industry
reporters. “This is a really important statistic because we all know that
Millennials have different goals and preferences than older generations,
speaking broadly, when it comes to work. For example only 10% of Millennials
who are currently looking for a new job with us say they are doing so for the
purpose of finding higher paying work.”

The vast majority of Millennials instead tell TheMuse they
are looking for work that will make them happier or give their life more
meaning.

This may seem like data that is more relevant for other
human resources and benefits discussions outside the retirement plan—say, for
the decision about whether an employer should offer flexible working hours or
the opportunity to work remotely. But based on Wells Fargo data and on her own
firm’s analysis, Minshew suggested Millennials stand to inherit some $30
trillion in wealth over the coming decades, “and this has very important
implications for their financial futures, including the workplace retirement
planning picture.”

Responding to a question from PLANADVISER, Minshew agreed
that Millennials, and for that matter the older generations, are “often
over-generalized into one group.”

“There are nuances that require careful consideration,”
Minshew said. “But there are also common themes that are borne out clearly by
the data and which have a real impact in the marketplace today. Millennials
widely report an admirable eagerness
to invest in ways that benefit the greater good. And a fair number also reveal
that they are not yet financially independent—which obviously represents a
hurdle in their altruistic pursuits.”

According to data from Wells Fargo and TheMuse, if given
$1,000 to invest, 86% of Millennials would be motivated to invest in a company
that “makes the world a better place with their products.” At the same time,
74% also agree it “would be easier to stomach the ups and downs of investing if
the investments had a positive impact on the world.”

There is also near-unanimous agreement among Millennials
that “success at work is more about happiness than material prosperity.”
Related to this, 77% of employed Millennials say they are happy to go to work
every day.

Minshew suggested another important fact to consider is that
44% of Millennials say they have turned down a job offer with equal or better
pay because of a “disconnect with the organizational culture of the prospective
employer.”

“We see from our discussions with employers that there can
be a premium of up to 20% on hiring costs and time taken to successfully fill a
position when you have not established a process that sends a clear and
consistent signal to prospective employees about the company’s culture and its
treatment of its valued employees,” she concluded. “Employers must be willing
to adopt creative tactics to understand the preferences of the work force of
the future.”